Dave Harries: Grant, in the context of content, you talk a lot about visual media. The importance of visual media. Tell me a bit about that.
Grant Leboff: I think there’s a recognition now. The web has become a visual media forum. It’s not that people don’t read online, they will and that’s fine, but I think the most powerful content is often visual content. Pictures, you think that when you capture those moments, and that’s why I think you find the rise of things like Snapchat and Instagram, it’s really fast growing platforms because it works.
Video is very important in that as well. People would rather, in the main, watch something quickly then read something. You can pack a lot more information into a short video and, in some ways, smart phones allow for that. For many people the smartphone is their major interaction with online. Reading an article on a smartphone is not as easy. In these days of ban widths and 4G networks and everything, you’re actually picking up your smartphone and watching something which streams very nicely.
In terms of shareable content, things like memes and GIFs are very, very shareable. People love those. Again, you can get a really good message across in seconds and it’s very easy to repost it to somewhere else. I think when you’re thinking about content it’s not that you shouldn’t do any other type of content, I’m not suggesting you should never write anything anymore, but I do think that you have to think in terms of visual content as number 1.
Dave Harries: How important is it that that visual content is relevant as well as opposed to reposting somebody else’s funny picture of the cat on the skateboard or something like that?
Grant Leboff: Absolutely. When you’re trying to engage an audience, it’s very, very important. What you do with you social life in person is fine but when you’re trying to engage an audience, it is very, very important to make sure that everything you do is valued at because it’s very easy to lose that audience very, very quickly. Highly relevant to that audience and valuable.
There’s value in making someone life but in a relevant way because it’s relevant to your business, your industry. There’s value to giving them insight. There’s value in any of those things. Absolutely right, it’s got to be valued because, otherwise, the danger is you lose people very quickly.
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